Ideas without Skills: Where Should I Start?

SilverEternity

Background: I am the coordinator (teacher) of a credit-recovery program that utilizes online classes. Students attend school as normal and sit in a lab to work on their classes for 5-6 hours a day. As such, staying motivated is a problem for many students. I am currently reading Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken and have developed some ideas based on those presented in the book.

Idea: I would like to incorporate game-like feedback for students such as achievements, “level bars” that fill up as they get lessons done, etc. I already utilize a plethora of excel spreadsheets with goal dates, color-coding, and charts to update students. However, I would like to create game-like dynamic graphics that look like the feedback they are familiar with (at least 90% of my students are “gamers”). I would then display these on my blog or some other social-networking apparatus. Taking into account that I have about 2 months this summer to indulge in learning I would like to start on a path of trying to create these things.

Problem: I am not sure where to begin. I am extremely novice as my only programming experience involves two computer classes I took in high school (basic C++, a little java, and html) ten years ago and more recently writing some simple programs for graphing calculators. My current thought is that trying to learn to program java might be a good start, but since I am so inexperienced any suggestions/thoughts/musings would be much appreciated. Thanks!

BlindZenDriver

Sounds to me like Flash may be way to go only there is no Flash on iPhones so may that is a no because of your target group. This then leads me to think of HTML5 but I have not touched that yet so no idea where to start (or if it's really a good direction to follow).

The data you want to display where is that and how often is it updated. Is it like something you enter into a spreadsheet after class or is there something on-line/real-time that should be visualized?

Wezoin

Why not just make a series of .jpeg files for the bar with different levels filled in, for example (level1.jpg, level2.jpg, level3.jpg) and then just update the code manually each time a student levels up? Unless you have a lot of students it won't take any longer than any other method you code, and it's by far the simplest way to do it. Unless you'd rather make a StudentsName.jpg and just overwrite the file for each student with the appropriate level image instead of changing the code.

SilverEternity

Wezoin wrote: »

Why not just make a series of .jpeg files for the bar with different levels filled in, for example (level1.jpg, level2.jpg, level3.jpg) and then just update the code manually each time a student levels up? Unless you have a lot of students it won't take any longer than any other method you code, and it's by far the simplest way to do it. Unless you'd rather make a StudentsName.jpg and just overwrite the file for each student with the appropriate level image instead of changing the code.

I believe that doing this would be extremely time consuming. All of the students in the program are working on different combinations of courses and have a different number of lessons they need to complete each day. Thus I feel the only way to do this would be to actually edit a .jpeg for each student each day which I simply do not have the time to do. In order for the feedback to be meaningly I feel that it needs to be something that is updated daily at a minimum. I currently have an excel sheet that calculates how many lessons each student has left and how many lessons per day the student needs to complete to reach their particular goal. This only requires entering the number of lessons a student completed the previous day to update.

Dr. Frenchenstein

unless the students are accessing their own profiles, flash seems like a bit of overkill.

SilverEternity

BlindZenDriver wrote: »

The data you want to display where is that and how often is it updated. Is it like something you enter into a spreadsheet after class or is there something on-line/real-time that should be visualized?

The number of lessons each student completes is updated in real time in the online gradebook, then I export this data into excel and insert it into a spreadsheet at the end of each day.

Also, I'm okay with overkill, it's not just that I want to create something meaningful for the students I also think it would be fun to have a project to work on over the summer.

Any suggestions for books or other resources to start with?